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How would you capitalize on this?

I run an advice website where users pay to receive advice from me in an area that I am quite skilled and trained in. It is a very popular site and I get a good number of paid questions each day. I currently have a premium option for an answer within 5-15 minutes (available if I am online), a standard option where they get an answer within 24 hours and a free section. There are only so many questions I can answer in the free section and so it is made really clear that only a small portion of the free questions get answered, and you have to wait 7-14 days for an answer.

Yet, each day I get many questions in the free section....way too many for me to answer. I choose questions to answer that will benefit my site's SEO. The rest are all declined.

I keep thinking that there has to be a way to capitalize on the fact that many users each day (probably a couple of thousand per month) are willing to give me user generated content.

I don't want to publish the questions without an answer. I don't want my site to look spammy.

I was thinking of creating a forum where users could ask their free questions and other users could offer help to each other. Then, I could jump in where necessary. (Hey..this kind of sounds like SEOMoz in a way.)

9 Responses

I would be careful if you are in a field that requires a license or where there are very few qualified professionals.

You don't want idiots blathering unqualified advice that gets repeated far and wide by people saying "I read how to do brain surgery on Dunamis.com".

SEO might be different in that there are quite a few people who are genuine experts (but even here there are blathering idiots and people like me who know quite a bit but still serve up bad advice more often than we should).

I would turn the free question section into a FAQ and hire on an editor or VA to help organize it for you. Similar to here, you'll probably get a lot of repeats, but that data will help you to figure out what's popular and what needs to be added to your FAQ.

You'd also get the benefit of content freshness as related questions just help modify and build out your existing answers.

How likely will I be to monetize users who expect to get answers for free?

Is there a chance that my paid Q&A site will in the future get lots of competition from a free competitor?

If you don't want to go with a forum solution for unpaid questions (and you feel like the pool of experts question answers you could attract to your site is large enough) consider a question marketplace where other experts get paid to answer questions and you take a cut of each transaction.

If you feel like the population of true experts is relatively small and you don't expect to get competition in the future from a competitor who answers questions for free I'd keep all the unpaid questions online along with your price for answering them within 15 minutes. I'd then make sure I marketed the heck out of myself as a true expect. Under these circumstances I don't think your site would seem spammy for leaving up free questions (and acquiring some SEO benefit from them). If your one of the few true experts online and you are filling a need then people will be willing to pay.

First is along the lines of the latter part of Tait's answer, but just a little different:Leave up all of the free questions for a limited time (ie 60 days), making it clear that a selection of the more challenging/interesting questions may be answered within that time period, but with clickable options on each one to enable users to escalate it to either 14 days, 24 hours or 15 mins (when online) by paying the appropriate fee. This would allow other people with the same question to see it and escalate it to get an answer that may help everyone.

Second is to set a limit on the number of free questions accepted each day and have the site indicate when the day's quota of free questions is filled. If people really want an answer they will pay, or get in earlier tomorrow to ask it for free.

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